Infiltrate Exploit Spread Final: Now on YouTube

     As a failsafe I decided to upload the animation to YouTube as well as Vimeo in case there were any viewing, quality or graphical complications with the Vimeo video. You never know.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Complete Composition

     I think it might be safe to say this animation is finished. Its been a lot of work but I am rather happy with what came out i nthe end. This is now a work I feel I can be confident displaying. It has been a very long and tough road but it was also an interesting road.

Completing this however has gotten me exited for the upcoming year.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Generating the Information

    Working on the first title card I realised that the process of creating text I was using was a rather arduous and time-consuming process. Rather than constructing in photoshop and composing in Adobe Flash like before, I looked into the text generation features in Adobe After Effects to see if I could more efficiently produce the effect of text being generated onscreen.

    First I needed a script, which I wrote up on Photoshop so I could also get an idea of what the text could look like when it's displayed on the side of the animation.

    Text appears using a wipe. Like with the title and exit cards, I aimed for a speed of two letters per frame in order to simulate the camera's computer generating the text. I did have to make a choice between two generation ideas: The first idea was line-by-line, where ext would appear in lines, which a lot of modern computers do. Older computers however (and the sort where green text was common) did letter-by-letter generation. Because of the Alien influences and the fact that computers at the time Alien was made generated statistics via the second method, I stuck with that.

    Working on the text bodies I had the idea of keeping the majority lowercase instead of all-capitals, save for perhaps a "critical error" message, which by that point everything in the scene would be malfuctioning.

    When it came to superimposing in After-Effects however, I discovered that the black background accompanies the text when it was exported.to be inserted into premiere pro, this felt solved when I used a screen filter for the text layer however in light backgrounds the text proved difficult to see.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Title Card Proprosal.

    An afternoon of working and I have a first version of my proprosed title card. The timings are not perfect, in the middle it feels a little sloppy but this can be tweaked to be more evenly paced when the title is sequenced into the rest of the animation.

Infilatrate Exploit Spread: Initial Refined Sequences

These have been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of days now, as the summer break has not entirely left me with nothing to do; with this, the painting ideas, Maya tutorials and development of personal concepts. As of right now, three months feels like it might not be long enough for everything I want to do.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Animation Pre-Vis

Infilatrate Exploit Spread: Cover Art

In preparation for Tuesday I have created a disk cover for my work. Not the best I admit and again it seems more like plaster than brushed steel (perhaps if I tone down the contrast). Practice makes perfect though I suppose.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Art Of Document

Art Of Infiltrate Exploit Spread

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Final Video

Animation is completed and uploaded.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Inside the Mosquito

     Now on the final week of the Infiltrate Exploit Spread project, I felt a pressing need to construct all scenes - an ambitious thing considering everything I have spent the last nine weeks devleoping. It's slowly coming together and there are now only two major scenes that need constructing - the merozoites leaving the hepatocyte and the merozoites bursting out a of a red blood cell to spread.

     I do sort of like the greenish light that the environment has - it makes the whole place feels errie and sickly, which suits the malicious nature of malaria and its rather insidious nature as a parasite.

    

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Merozoite Reproduction phase

    I decided the next phase was the reproduction of the merozoites inside the red blood cell. Normally they produce insite a schizont that bursts (along with the red blood cell) once it is swollen enough with merozoites, but to simplify things the merozoites reproduce within the material of the red blood cell. But the essential information is there - merozoites enter the red blood cell and reproduce until the cell swells and bursts from overcapacity.

    First pass felt a little too artificial so I decided to step it up by giving the merozoites some motion, in this video they move in a circuit path inside the red blood cell.

    I considered the idea that to best display the reproduction the cross section could be via an x-ray scan, which would also allow me to render it in a separate scene file. It's likely that when it comes to bursting, not all of these merozoites will be seen coming out at once.

    This is what the interior will look like when it is close to bursting. In the playblast I used a basic transparency shader in order ot show what was going on inside during the pre-vis stages, as the x-ray shader is opaque in the workspace due to using a ramp shader to define the opacity.

     Then I thought "I'm making a science fiction piece, I don't have to stick to hospital scrub green", so I looked into using two shaders - one for the red blood cell and one for the "hostile identified" merozoites. Render times for these frames (at 50% resolution) appear to hover around the 1:14 mark. So despite all the geometry render times don't seem too bad compared to everything else I have made so far.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Mosquito Motion Refinement.

    I did some editing on the Mosquito's animations. I'm not sure what happened during encoding to compress the video at the sides the video like this but I suppose it's not too bad as the essentials of what I want ot convey in the video remain in there. The 1920x1080 resolution is still on my computer so at least I have the undistorted version on record.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: The Mosquito's Arrival

     This animation was rather fun to do, especially the initial approach there the mosquito adjusts itself as it prepares for landing, something helicopters and VTOL jets to to align themselves ready for landing. It took a little tweaking to make sure the corrections didn't look like the pilot was having trouble keeping the craft steady.

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    The model's textures are still, unfortunately a work in progress, but after liking the results of the chromed blood vessel tunnel I decided ot investigate doing similar with the legs of the mosquito to reinforce a metallic look. I was also drawn to the idea of a reflective cockpit window though with that oen I am considering toning down the reflectivity to keep the window dark. One advantage though is that I have less that needs being given a texture map

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    I also tried tweaking the direction of the light, although I do feel that the initial angle allowed the viewer to see more.

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Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Lighting Tests

    I added a narea light to hover over the red blood cell. Each shaft (left-to-right) is done with the following parameters:

1. gamma = 0.2    intensity = 0.1
2. gamma = 0.2    intensity = 0.15
3. gamma = 0.2    intensity = 0.2
4. gamma = 0.05  intensity = 0.2
5. gamma = 0.1    intensity = 0.2

I have a personal preference for 3. Lowering the gamma appears to  make the shadows less definitive, so I'll keep the gamma relitively reasonable.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: The Merozoite's insertion

     It took longer than I thought it would to construct this stage, largely because of my attempts to perfect the workings of the light that would come out of the hole that would open up to let the merozoite inside. My mai nconcern so far is that due to the present tunnel setup, it is somewhat dark in the renders that include the environment. To alleviate it I could add a light that focuses on this one object pairing, a dim one, so as not to interfere too much with the present highlights. The source of it is likely because the red blood cell is facing the wrong way to the spotlight that illuminates the far side of the tunnel (which this thing is approaching)

1: That's not really supposed to happen, but easily fixed by keyframing the light.

2: Lighting with nothing really inside save for a spotlight or an area light doesn't appear to work very well.

2: Added a surface shader to a flat square underneath the opening but this is far too bright.

3: By lowering the out colour and out glow colour I can have much more control over the light's intensity

4: By changing the out glow colour to 100% red I get a very creepy red glow from it.

5: The slight downside is that the surface shader doesn't appear to render the light that may come from regions invisible to the camera

6: Restored the area light underneath to answer my issue but the stoppage point is too sudden.

7: Like with the surface shader, by altering the intensity integer and the light colour I can get a more gradual light.

8: Still got the issue with "light bleeding though the hole" but this was fixed by turning it off.

9: Sinister light, which would be white at this stage in the final render.

10: A nice creepy red light as the merozoite prepares to settle in

11: The initial light would be white, but would change after the Merozoite goes some way inside.

12: I think this might be a fair balance.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Refined Mosquito Apporach

     Looking to refine the Mosquito Approach clip I added a camera and gave it some motion along with refining the Mosquito's motion path (it was a little wobbly in places). I thought it might suit the "airborne approach" feel if the camera glided with the mosquito's journey, along with a bit of shake to get the feel of the speed and power of the mosquito as it heads towards its target.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Hepatocyte Infection

Took some effort to get there and there's always room for improvement but here is my planned animation for the phase where a sporozoite enters the liver cell in order to create merozoites.

Infiltrate Exlpoit Spread: Depth of Field and Reflection Tests

    Trying out depth of field and reflection in Maya to bring focus to the Sporozoite. The only thing I'm not so keen on is the black outline around out-of-focus blood cells although this might be to do with the relative darkness of the environment they're inside.

Admittedly, in an atempt to alter focus for the tunnel and the blood cells, these two pictures ended up quite similar to each other.

    This was the origina lreflection level, but I wasn't so sure due to the intensity of the ligth on the right-hand side. The images above this one are the same image with the transparency of the layer toned down to 60%

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Mosquito's Approach

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Landing Test

    Taking a break from texturing the mosquito I decided to construct the animation parameters for when it lands. The landing impact could probably do with a bit of work but for the most part it seems fine. Though I definitely think I need to refine the "oomph" it delivers when it lands.